Shit, this is astonishing. Redrow, a luxury apartment builder, have made this creepy, completely dystopic, half-American Psycho advert for the new London they’re currently metastasizing all over the city. Its protagonist lives in a world of almost continual night, with the hungry eyes and dead affect of an Ayn Rand wet dream: his world is constituted of chrome, glass, a palette of white-to-taupe, a spatter-pattern rug and one book, a single book, on graphic design. ‘Luxury’ is so often a code for this – double-glazed, polished steel, hermetically sealed in the back of a cab. Our man does not have conversations, but stares out at the city from the fifteenth floor (he does a lot of staring). The concept of conversation is alien to him, though he is shown having a screaming argument; as you see from his inventoried shelves, he has a passion for objects and this is how he treats women, as well.

Flat-toned, void affect, social cancer in a suit: a model for London living. Here’s a curious honesty about it all: houses in the suburbs are marketed still for the smiling happy family, all oak tables and smiling coffee mornings (in zone 4, the dog never even barks, let alone bites). In the central zones, having been cleared of many of their inconveniences (families, communities, *life*), now deadboxes are marketed to the single (wannabe singular) sub-Thatcherite dweeb who manages his violence only on a balance sheet, who wants to take life, pin it, and crush it behind plate glass. Let us burn it down.

“Through planning applications and radio licenses it’s possible to trace the routes these signals travel: each license lists the start and end location of each point-to-point link. Follow these lines; follow the money.”

On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. […] By 1883, weather stations in scores of cities across the world were using barometers to track changes in atmospheric pressure. Six hours and 47 minutes after the Krakatoa explosion, a spike of air pressure was detected in Calcutta. By 8 hours, the pulse reached Mauritius in the west and Melbourne and Sydney in the east. By 12 hours, St. Petersburg noticed the pulse, followed by Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. By 18 hours the pulse had reached New York, Washington DC, and Toronto. Amazingly, for as many as 5 days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure re-occuring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.

“The ancient Maya city of Tikal may have used intensive agricultural practices to maintain its large population, according to a study by David Lentz of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues. While these practices enabled sustainable population growth for some time, they may eventually have exacerbated a drought that caused the abandonment of the city.”

Once on the bottom, they waited and watched. And they got some big surprises. “We saw the deepest living fish ever recorded,” says Drazen. “Definitely something new. We took one look at the thing and were amazed — big, wide, winglike fins, this eel-like tail and this scalloped face. It was very unique.” They nicknamed it the “ghost fish” for its almost translucent skin. It appears to be a new species of snailfish — living 5 miles below the surface.

It was not the individual events that made 2014 so topsy-turvy: after all, what could top the 1991 Soviet collapse for sheer disruption of the status quo? The year instead was remarkable for the number of big, consequential and utterly unforeseen events—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of ISIL, the diplomatic breakthrough between the US and Cuba, the emergence of US shale oil and the collapse of oil prices, not to mention a clutch of other economic, business and market events. All in all, it has been evident for months that 2014 was a staggering maelstrom of surprises.

Plumbing is a new mechanism for inter-process communication in Plan 9, specifically the passing of messages between interactive programs as part of the user interface. Although plumbing shares some properties with familiar notions such as cut and paste, it offers a more general data exchange mechanism without imposing a particular user interface. From Plumbing and other utilities by Rob Pike

Accelerationism is, for me, worth studying briefly, as it seems to me to be a response to pervasive capitalism brought on by the mental illnesses that capitalism has induced in people. (Schizophrenia is talked about, a lot, e.g. “in Nietzsche’s ‘schizo’ delirium he announced ‘I am all the names of history’”) Noys himself calls them “the fetishists of capital” at one point, but I have a feeling, and Noys often implies, that it’s a deeper malaise. Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new shapes just leads some people to rub their mouths on it and plead for it to go faster. And never stop. (Also: accelerationism, like speculative realism and its surrounding notions, kind of strikes me as Science Fiction Condition philosophical enterprise. its roots may indeed go back to the 19th Century, but the modern conception is something else.)

Adapting the absurdist metaphysical conjectures of Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry’s Science of imaginary solutions) to Botany creates a fantastic ecology of verdant pataphors. Metaflora, Phycological futurology and hypnogogic phyllotaxis perhaps? Libarynth invents and documents this new branch of speculative science and its related offshoots by ‘patafying’ the study of plants. Triffids take note! Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney’s Cursory Speculations on Human Plant Interaction ‘explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate reciprocal interaction between humans and plants’. Examined in the paper: the continued evolution of human-plant symbiotics – in their somatic and syntactic protocols. This includes shamanic enthogenic communication and Thalient strategies.

“The Lego isn’t a one-off thing - it happens all the time. There’s a certain type of cigarette lighter that’s from a container spill more than 20 years ago which is still washing up on Cornish beaches today.”

I AM walking through my north London neighbourhood on an unseasonably warm day in late autumn. I can hear birds tweeting in the trees, traffic prowling the back roads, children playing in gardens and Wi-Fi leaching from their homes. Against the familiar sounds of suburban life, it is somehow incongruous and appropriate at the same time. As I approach Turnpike Lane tube station and descend to the underground platform, I catch the now familiar gurgle of the public Wi-Fi hub, as well as the staff network beside it. On board the train, these sounds fade into silence as we burrow into the tunnels leading to central London. I have been able to hear these fields since last week. This wasn’t the result of a sudden mutation or years of transcendental meditation, but an upgrade to my hearing aids. With a grant from Nesta, the UK innovation charity, sound artist Daniel Jones and I built Phantom Terrains, an experimental tool for making Wi-Fi fields audible.

The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us. The items are shown in the exhibition «The Darknet. From Memes to Onionland» at Kunst Halle St. Gallen. Each new object ads to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.

“I went home and noted: Only ever write when you have something worth writing. Write short stories because you want to. Write short novels because that’s what you want. Always defer or deny closure. Always break the structure. Always undermine or contradict the rationale. Always refuse a conceptually interpretable or comfortable ending. I thought for a bit and then added: You can offer resolution but only at another level. Then, finally: Keep saying no.”

Current reading material: Branding Terror: The Logotypes and Iconography of Insurgent Groups and Terrorist Organizations. I find this book amazing on both a surface level and a conceptual level. On the surface it’s an absolutely fascinating global survey of terrorist organizations with a breakdown of the symbology behind their choice of logos, right down to the Pantone colors used. On a conceptual level I’m repulsed and terrified by both sides of the study: the terror groups themselves for obvious reasons, and for more subtle reasons the insidiousness of global market capitalism, which in its shark-like ceaseless devouring is able to analyze even such outsider icons in terms of Pantone colors and graphic elements, treating the ISIS logo in the same category as the AT&T logo. It’s an amazing document for our times. Amazon link.

She hooks it onto her belt so she can’t fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she’s not tangled up in the cable anymore, lust dangling by the waist, twisting around and around between the chopper and the street, out of control.

“The Ezadeen had been drifting without power about 40 nautical miles off the coast with as many as 450 people on board. “We know that it left from a Turkish port and was abandoned by its crew,” coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini told SkyTG24 television. “When we hailed the ship to ask about its status, a migrant woman responded, saying, ‘We are alone and we have no one to help us.’” It had been put on a collision course for the Italian coast but ran out of fuel, he said. A similar tactic was used by the crew of a ship which, on Tuesday, put out a distress call as it passed the Greek island of Corfu on its way into the Adriatic Sea. Almost 800 migrants, mostly Syrian refugees, landed in Italy the following day after the Italian rescue services took command of the vessel. The Moldovan-registered Blue Sky M was within five miles and 45 minutes’ sailing time of a disaster when it was boarded and brought under control.”

“Someone recently started an account called @AhistoricalPics, poking fun at the inaccuracies of accounts like @HistoryInPics and @HistoryInPix. The parody account tweets out obviously false facts, and silly photoshopped creations. But amazingly, the folks behind @HistoryInPix didn’t get the joke. They took that obviously mislabeled photo from the parody account and presented it as real.”

“With this book the public/private switch has been flipped, not to mention the paper/digital one. And I don’t mean just the specific material included, but the very idea of it. “Sketchbook” may well describe a new genre, one in which the emphasis is firmly on process and the profiles don’t proceed to any finalized form. And that’s fine, because it turns out that looking over the shoulder of working photographers is just as fascinating as viewing their finished projects. No two methodologies are the same, although notably almost all photographers in the book work with physical drafts rather than digital.”

“Doug Cunningham, president and CEO of Arctic Fibre, knows this misery all too well: Because upload speeds were too slow, he had to use a courier to send his 227-page environmental report on the cable to the review board in Cambridge Bay, a hamlet in Canada’s most northern province.”

“Shell was trying the logistical equivalent of a mission to the moon. During the short Arctic summer, when the sea ice made its annual retreat, Shell would have to bring not only the Kulluk but everything else: personnel, tankers, icebreakers, worker housing, supply vessels, helicopters, tugboats, spill-cleanup barges and a secondary rig to drill a relief well in case of a blowout. In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Shell would build a $400 million Arctic-ready containment dome, an extra layer of spill protection that it would also need to drag north.”

MALIGN VELOCITIES by Benjamin Noys is a recent work on the subject of accelerationism, a notion whose general thrust is that, in order to achieve the goals of revolution, capitalism should be unchained, turbo-charged, and driven to its natural conclusion so that it explodes and dies. Noys provides an extremely thorough historical context for the idea, and it’s a fascinating deep dive. I lingered…

“Since 1977 I have been conducting research on cyranoids,” Milgram said. He quickly explained: “Cyranoids are people who do not speak thoughts originating in their own central nervous system: Rather, the words that they speak originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid by means of a radio transmitter.” The term was inspired by the French play Cyrano de Bergerac, in which a brilliant but ugly man woos his beloved through love letters signed with the name of a handsome nobleman.

“In an even more bizarre exhibit, artists posted flyers around South Bank in London proclaiming that a unicorn would appear at a certain time. Nobody actually thought a unicorn was going to appear, but people gathered around anyway to see what was up, says Gillespie, who helped organize the performance. At the designated time, a group of about 10 people started speaking in unison: “We are the unicorn.” Unbeknownst to the crowd, they were cyranoids under the control of one of the artists. People in the audience initially thought it was all scripted, but the cyranoids answered in unison to spontaneous questions posed by people in the crowd.”

“Buzz is tired. Buzz is so tired of these moon-wisdom questions, nearly a half century of the same questions about feelings that leave him feeling inadequate. He is a man of science. Next time NASA should send up a poet, he wrote in one of his books, a philosopher, an artist, a journalist. He wasn’t being flip. He thought mankind clearly needed to send up people who know how to translate feelings.”

“The biggest thing with falling asleep in space,” says Mike Hopkins, who returned from a six-month tour on the Space Station last March, “is kind of a mental thing. On Earth, when I’ve had a long day, when I’m mentally and physically tired—when you first lie down on your bed, there’s a sense of relief. You get a load off your feet. There’s an immediate sense of relaxation. In space, you never feel that. You never have that feeling of taking weight off your feet—or that emotional relief.” Some astronauts miss it enough that they bungee-cord themselves to the wall, to provide a sense of lying down.

Sleep position presents its own challenges. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often drifting out from your body, giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a wacky ballet dancer. “I’m an inside guy,” Hopkins says. “I like to be cocooned up.”

“Why do 18th century English paintings have so many squirrels in them, and how did they tame them so that they wouldn’t bite the painter?” It’s easy to find answers to such perplexing questions today. A quick Google search explains that squirrels were once desirable pets, and that domesticating them could be achieved in six simple steps. But in 1976, when the question was first posed to a librarian at the New York Public Library (NYPL), the internet hadn’t yet made everything ridiculously easy. Unable to answer the query, the bemused librarian who received it typed it onto a reference card and filed it away. Recently, a staff member found the recipe box (labeled “Interesting Reference Questions”) containing it and hundreds others asked between the 1940s and 1980s while cleaning out a desk. NYPL has since been posting pictures of its contents to Twitter and Instagram under the hashtag #LetMeLibrarianThatForYou.